America’s ‘Postracial’ Fantasy

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CreditCreditIllustration by Javier Jaén

By Anna Holmes

June 30, 2015

On Father’s Day, my dad and I had brunch with some close friends of mine. The conversation soon turned to their two sons: their likes, their dislikes, their habit of disrupting classmates during nap time at nursery school. At one point, as I ran my hand through one of the boys’ silky brown hair, I asked whether they consider their kids biracial. (The father is white; the mother is South Asian.) Before they could respond, the children’s paternal grandmother, in town for a visit, replied as if the answer were the most obvious thing in the world: ‘‘They’re white.’’

I was taken aback, but I also realized she had a point: The two boys, who have big brown eyes and just a blush of olive in their skin, are already — and will probably continue to be — regarded as white first, South Asian a distant second. Nothing in their appearance would suggest otherwise, and who’s to say whether, once they realize that people see them as white, they will feel the need to set the record straight? Most people prefer the straightforward to the complex — especially when it comes to conversations about race.

A Pew Research Center study released in June, ‘‘Multiracial in America,’’ reports that ‘‘biracial adults who are white and Asian say they have more in common with whites than they do with Asians’’ and ‘‘are more likely to say they feel accepted by whites than by Asians.’’ While 76 percent of all mixed-­race Americans claim that their backgrounds have made ‘‘no difference’’ in their lives, the data and anecdotes included in the study nevertheless underscore how, for a fair number of us, words like ‘‘multiracial’’ and ‘‘biracial’’ are awkward and inadequate, denoting identities that are fluid for some and fixed for others.

This is especially true, I think, for the progeny of mixed-­race black-white relationships: As the daughter of an African-­American father and a white mother, born with olive skin, light eyes and thick, curly hair, I have been aware of a tension between the way the outside world sees me, the way the government sees me (I was already 27 when the census changed its options so Americans could check off two or more races) and the ways in which I see myself. Sometimes identifying as black feels like a choice; other times, it is a choice made for me.

Just a few years ago, the election of Barack Obama signaled to some that the country had arrived at a new reckoning with old categories, that many of America’s racial wounds had healed, or that at least it was possible to move on from them. The term ‘‘post­racial’’ was everywhere: in thousands of newspaper articles and op-ed essays and on the lips of political pundits like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who proudly said that he forgot, for a moment, that Obama was black. Books were published on subjects like ‘‘postracial cinema,’’ the ‘‘postracial church’’ and ‘‘postracial black leadership.’’ Data from 2008-9 showed that one in seven new marriages was between spouses of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. And an article from The New York Times in 2011 noted that some people felt that ‘‘the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.’’

The word ‘‘postracial’’ has been around since at least the early 1970s, when an article in this newspaper used it to describe a coalition of Southern government officials who believed that their region had ‘‘entered an era in which race relations are soon to be replaced as a major concern.’’ That didn’t happen. When a 21-year-old white supremacist was charged in the fatal shootings of nine African-­Americans in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, it was a stark reminder that the past half decade has provided little evidence of reckoning or repair. According to a recent Gallup poll, more black Americans in 2015 than in 2014 regard race relations as one of the most pressing problems in the United States. As for the term ‘‘postracial,’’ well, it has mostly disappeared from the conversation, except as sarcastic shorthand.

This is probably how it should be. When people talked about being ‘‘post­racial,’’ they were often really talking about being ‘‘postblack’’ — or, more charitably, ‘‘post-­racist-­against-­blacks.’’ After all, blackness is seen as an opposite to the default — the ideal — of whiteness, and chattel slavery and the legacies it left behind continue to shape American society. Sometimes it seems as if the desire for a ‘‘postracial’’ America is an attempt by white people to liberate themselves from the burden of having to deal with that legacy.

As a child born a few years after Loving v. Virginia — the 1967 Supreme Court case that effectively ended miscegenation laws — to a mixed-­race couple, I was keenly aware of the ways in which many people, especially liberal white people, saw me as an avatar for a colorblind civilization in which the best of white and black America banded together to move beyond this country’s shameful history by birthing beautiful beige-­colored babies. I was subject to a certain inquisitiveness, though well meaning, that I found irritating and doubted was directed at my darker-­skinned brothers and sisters: questions about which parent was black and which was white; incredulity about my hazel eyes; inquiries about whether I consider myself African-­American.

I was a curiosity, and a comfort: a black girl who was just white enough to seem familiar, not foreign, someone who could serve as an emissary or a bridge between blackness and whiteness. It’s true that I can move about the world in ways that many other black people cannot; for one thing, I am rarely racially profiled. My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These ex­peri­ences led me to suspect that the breathless ‘‘post­racial’’ commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is ­biracial as with the fact that he is black. His blood relationship to whiteness and its attendant privileges serve as a chaser to the difficult-­to-­swallow prospect that a black man might achieve ownership of the Oval Office.

My interactions with the world also underscored that biracial children are not in any way created equal — others’ interpretations of us are informed by assumptions based on appearance. Few black-white biracial Americans, compared with multiracial Asian-­whites, have the privilege of easily ‘‘passing’’: Our blackness defines us and marks us in a way that mixed-­race parentage in others does not. As the Pew survey explains, children of Native American-­white parents make up over half of the country’s multiracial population and, like Asian-­white children, are usually thought of as white. The survey also reports that although the number of black-white biracial Americans more than doubled from 2000 to 2010, 69 percent of them say that most others see them solely as black; ‘‘for multiracial adults with a black background,’’ Pew notes, ‘‘experiences with discrimination closely mirror those of single-­race blacks.’’

On June 11, the same day that the Pew report was released, another provocative narrative about racial politics emerged: that of Rachel Dolezal, a 37-year-old white woman and N.A.A.C.P. leader in Spokane, Wash., who had been masquerading as black for over a decade. Some commentators dispassionately proposed that Dolezal’s charade was yet another iteration of the white American tradition of co-­opting the black American experience; others, like many of my biracial black-white friends, expressed outrage about her identity theft. Dolezal got to indulge in the myth of the self-made American, of choosing whom she wanted to be. But unlike actual black people, she could discard her putative blackness at any time, which made her performance all the more offensive and absurd. The spectacle of a naturally blond Montana native parading around broadcast and cable news studios insisting that she didn’t identify as white reinforced the fact that for many Americans, blackness is impossible to divorce from ideas of what blackness looks like. (In Dolezal’s case, that meant well-­applied bronzer, braids and a weave.)

Being — or appearing — biracial is a real Rorschach test with regard to how our ideas about race have evolved. For every person who hardly bats an eye at the idea of a light-skinned biracial woman identifying as African-American, there’s another person waiting to inform her that she doesn’t ‘‘look very black’’ (the white husband of a Korean-­American friend) or that she is not actually black at all (an African-­American entrepreneur in a professional women’s association to which I belong). Which is why, when people I meet ask me, ‘‘What are you?’’ my usual response is to look at them with amusement and shoot back, ‘‘What do you think I am?’’

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